Authors: Sonia Nazario
Enrique's Journey
To my husband, Bill
PROLOGUE
I
t is Friday morning, 8
A
.
M
. I hear a key turn in the front-door lock of my Los Angeles home. MarÃa del Carmen Ferrez, who cleans my house every other week, opens the door. She walks into the kitchen.
Carmen is petite, intelligent, and works at lightning speed. At this early hour I am usually in a frenzy to get out the door and rush to my office. But on days when Carmen arrives, she and I shift gears. Carmen loiters in the kitchen, tidying things. I circle around her, picking up shoes, newspapers, socksâtrying to give her a fighting chance at cleaning the floors. The ritual allows us to be in the same room and talk.
On this morning in 1997, I lean on one side of the kitchen island. Carmen leans on the other side. There is a question, she says, that she has been itching to ask. “Mrs. Sonia, are you ever going to have a baby?”
I'm not sure, I tell her. Carmen has a young son she sometimes brings to watch television while she works. Does she want more children? I ask.
Carmen, always laughing and chatty, is suddenly silent. She stares awkwardly down at the kitchen counter. Then, quietly, she tells me about four other children I never knew existed. These childrenâtwo sons and two daughtersâare far away, Carmen says, in Guatemala. She left them there when she ventured north as a single mother to work in the United States.
She has been separated from them for twelve years.
Her youngest daughter, Carmen says, was just a year old when she left. She has experienced her oldest boy, Minor, grow up by listening to the deepening timbre of his voice on the telephone. As Carmen unravels the story, she begins to sob.
Twelve years? I react with disbelief. How can a mother leave her children and travel more than two thousand miles away, not knowing when or if she will ever see them again? What drove her to do this?
Carmen dries her tears and explains. Her husband left her for another woman. She worked hard but didn't earn enough to feed four children. “They would ask me for food, and I didn't have it.” Many nights, they went to bed without dinner. She lulled them to sleep with advice on how to quell their hunger pangs. “Sleep facedown so your stomach won't growl so much,” Carmen said, gently coaxing them to turn over.
She left for the United States out of love. She hoped she could provide her children an escape from their grinding poverty, a chance to attend school beyond the sixth grade. Carmen brags about the clothes, money, and photos she sends her children.
She also acknowledges having made brutal trade-offs. She feels the distance, the lack of affection, when she talks with her children on the telephone. Day after day, as she misses milestones in their lives, her absence leaves deep wounds. When her oldest daughter has her first menstruation, she is frightened. She doesn't understand what is happening to her. Why, the girl asks Carmen, were you not here to explain?
Carmen hasn't been able to save enough for a smuggler to bring them to the United States. Besides, she refuses to subject her children to the dangerous journey. During her own 1985 trek north, Carmen was robbed by her smuggler, who left her without food for three days. Her daughters, she fears, will get raped along the way. Carmen balks at bringing her children into her poor, drug- and crime-infested Los Angeles neighborhood.
As she clicks the dishwasher on, Carmen, concerned that I might disapprove of her choice, tells me that many immigrant women in Los Angeles from Central America or Mexico are just like herâsingle mothers who left children behind in their home countries.
What's really incomprehensible, she adds, are middle-class or wealthy working mothers in the United States. These women, she says, could tighten their belts, stay at home, spend all their time with their children. Instead, they devote most of their waking hours and energy to careers, with little left for the children. Why, she asks, with disbelief on her face, would anyone do that?
The following year, in 1998, unannounced, Carmen's son Minor sets off to find his mother. Carmen left him when he was ten years old. He hitchhikes through Guatemala and Mexico. He begs for food along the way. He shows up on Carmen's doorstep.
He has missed his mother intensely. He could not stand another Christmas or birthday apart. He was tired of what he saw as his mother's excuses for why they could not be together. He had to know: Did she leave Guatemala because she never truly loved him? How else could he explain why she left?
Minor's friends in Guatemala envied the money and presents Carmen sent. “You have it all. Good clothes. Good tennis shoes,” they said. Minor answered, “I'd trade it all for my mother. I never had someone to spoil me. To say: Do this, don't do that, have you eaten? You can never get the love of a mother from someone else.”
Minor tells me about his perilous hitchhiking journey. He was threatened and robbed. Still, he says, he was lucky. Each year, thousands of other children going to find their mothers in the United States travel in a much more dangerous way. The children make the journey on top of Mexico's freight trains. They call it
El Tren de la Muerte.
The Train of Death.
A COMMON CHOICE
I was struck by the choice mothers face when they leave their children. How do they make such an impossible decision? Among Latinos, where family is all-important, where for women motherhood is valued far above all else, why are droves of mothers leaving their children? What would I do if I were in their shoes? Would I come to the United States, where I could earn much more money and send cash back to my children? This would mean my sons and daughters could eat more than sugar water for dinner. They could study past the third grade, maybe even finish high school, go on to university classes. Or I could stay by my children's side, relegating another generation to the same misery and poverty I knew so well.
I was also amazed by the dangerous journey these children make to try to be with their mothers. What kind of desperation, I wondered, pushes children as young as seven years old to set out, alone, through such a hostile landscape with nothing but their wits?
The United States is experiencing the largest wave of immigration in its history, a level of newcomers that is once again transforming the country. Each year, an estimated 700,000 immigrants enter the United States illegally. Since 2000, nearly a million additional immigrants annually, on average, have arrived legally, or become legal residents. This wave differs in one respect, at least, from the past. Before, when parents came to the United States and left children behind, it was typically the fathers, often Mexican guest workers called
braceros
, and they left their children with their mothers. In recent decades, the increase in divorce and family disintegration in Latin America has left many single mothers without the means to feed and raise their children. The growing ranks of single mothers paralleled a time when more and more American women began working outside the home. There is an insatiable need in the United States for cheap service and domestic workers. The single Latin American mothers began migrating in large numbers, leaving their children with grandparents, other relatives, or neighbors.
The first wave was in the 1960s and 1970s. Single mothers from a smattering of Caribbean countriesâthe West Indies, Jamaica, the Dominican Republicâheaded to New York City, New England, and Florida to work as nannies and in nursing homes. Later, Central American women flocked to places with the greatest demand: the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Houston, and Los Angeles, where the number of private domestic workers doubled in the 1980s.
Carmen's experience is now common. In Los Angeles, a University of Southern California study showed, 82 percent of live-in nannies and one in four housecleaners are mothers who still have at least one child in their home country. A Harvard University study showed that 85 percent of all immigrant children who eventually end up in the United States spent at least some time separated from a parent in the course of migrating to the United States.
In much of the United States, legitimate concerns about immigration and anti-immigrant measures have had a corrosive side effect: immigrants have been dehumanized and demonized. Their presence in the United States is deemed good or bad, depending on the perspective. Immigrants have been reduced to cost-benefit ratios.
Perhaps by looking at one immigrantâhis strengths, his courage, his flawsâhis humanity might help illuminate what too often has been a black-and-white discussion. Perhaps, I start thinking, I could take readers on top of these trains and show them what this modern-day immigrant journey is like, especially for children. “This,” a Los Angeles woman who helps immigrants told me, “is the adventure story of the twenty-first century.”
FEAR AND FLEAS
For a good while, I sat on the idea. As a journalist, I love to get inside the action, watch it unfold, take people inside worlds they might never otherwise see. I wanted to smell, taste, hear, and feel what this journey is like. In order to give a vivid, nuanced account, I knew I would have to travel with child migrants through Mexico on top of freight trains.
I thought about starting in Central America and tagging along as one boy tries to reach his mother in the United States. Carmen's son Minor had already explained enough about the trip for me to grasp that this was just shy of nutty. He'd told me about the gangsters who rule the train tops, the bandits along the tracks, the Mexican police who patrol the train stations and rape and rob, about the dangers of losing a leg getting onto and off of moving trains.
In short, I was afraid.
Then there was the issue of marital harmony: I'd just finished another project that involved hanging out in dark garages and shacks with speed, heroin, and crack addicts. My husband had spent months fretting about my safety. He'd had to ask politely that I strip in our garage each evening when I came home after hanging out in addicts' apartments. Apparently I'd been bringing home a healthy population of fleas. Talk of strapping myself to the top of a freight train, I figured, was not likely to be received with open ears. A year later, I hoped the memory of fleas had faded. I decided to move forward.
Cautiously.
First, I learned everything I could about the journey. What's the exact route? The best and worst things that happen at each step of the way? The places where migrants encounter the greatest cruelty? And the greatest kindness? Critical turning points in the journey? What are the favorite areas along the tracks where the gangs rob, where the bandits kill people? Where do Mexican immigration authorities stop the train?
I talked with dozens of children held by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in four jails and shelters in California and in Texas. Many had ridden the trains. So had students I had spoken with at a special Los Angeles high school for recent immigrants.
At a detention center in Los Fresnos, Texas, a talk with fifteen-year-old twins José Enrique and José Luis Oliva Rosa forced me to shred my initial plan. I realized that my first choiceâto follow one boy from the beginning of his journey in Central America to the end with his mother in the United Statesâwasn't doable. The twins had left Honduras to find their mother in Los Angeles. During the months they spent running for their lives in Mexico, they were separated from each other four times. Only sheer luck had allowed them to find each other. I can't run as fast as a fifteen-year-old. I also can't rely on that level of luck. I had to find a boy who had made it to northern Mexico and follow him to his mother in the United States. I would have to reconstruct the earlier part of his journey.
Children at the Texas center also brought home the dangers I would face making such a journey. At the Texas center was Eber Ismael Sandoval Andino, eleven, a petite boy with dark eyes and machete marks crisscrossing his legs. The marks were from working in the coffee farms of Honduras since he was six years old. On his train rides through Mexico, he told me, he had witnessed five separate incidents where migrants had been mutilated by the train. He'd seen a man lose half a foot getting on the train. He'd seen six gangsters draw their knives and throw a girl off the train to her death. Once, he'd fallen off the train and landed right next to the churning steel wheels. “I thought I was dead. I turned stone cold,” he said.
The director of the Texas center told me I'd be an idiot to attempt this train journey, that I could get myself killed. These kids, he said, motioning to the children around him, don't really understand the dangers they will face. They go into it with their eyes closed. They don't know any better. I understood the exact risks. I would be doing it out of sheer stupidity.
I am not a brave person. I grew up, in part, in Argentina during the genocidal “dirty war,” when the military “disappeared” up to thirty thousand people. Often I walked to school with a friend, in case something should happen to one of us. My mother burned the family's books in a pile in the backyard to avoid trouble if the military ever came to search our Buenos Aires home. We kept the windows closed so neighbors could not hear any discussion that strayed from the mundane into anything vaguely political. Among the disappeared and murdered was a teenage friend, who we heard had been tortured, the bones in his face shattered. A relative was abducted by the military, tortured, and released many months later.